Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo fama Marcelli: so it was with Posidonius from 1878 for forty years, with no voice raised to the contrary save by A. E. Housman in his caustic asides. Had we not found a figure lesser in dimensions than only Plato or Aristotle, the principal intellectual influence of two succeeding centuries, the fountainhead of Neoplatonism ? In retrospect the element of exaggeration is clear, and yet the quest must not be counted as labour in vain; for there came of it a great enlargement of the frontiers of scholarship. So in the familiar fable the sons did not find the buried treasure for which they dug, but their digging bore rich fruit.